The Art of getting along at work: why relationships matter
Getting along with people isn't easy, particularly when you're spending eight hours a day alongside colleagues you never actually chose, each with different personalities and working styles. Yet workplace relationships still get treated as a minor detail, something pleasant when it happens but hardly essential to how a company functions.
That's a genuine oversight, because working well with someone might require considerably more than surviving the same video call without interrupting each other.
What Gallup's research actually reveals
Gallup's research looks at the role personal relationships play at work, asking what it really means to have a “best friend” among your colleagues. By connecting these relationships to the CliftonStrengths model, which maps individual talents and strengths, the study explores why some workplace connections become meaningful while others remain purely professional.
The numbers are genuinely striking. Employees who report having a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their job. A previous Gallup meta-analysis covering over 180,000 teams found that increasing the number of employees with a best friend at work correlated with better work quality, and fewer safety incidents.
Trust, connection and where the boundaries sit
Four core elements emerge from Gallup's research on professional friendships: trust, personal connection, shared experiences and collaboration. At the centre of these dynamics is trust in the workplace, which allows people to rely on one another and speak openly without fearing that honesty or disagreement will damage the relationship.
For some people, these relationships extend into private life, whereas for others, the connection remains firmly within professional boundaries, and both approaches are entirely valid. As a matter of fact, the research also emphasises the importance of maintaining those boundaries, with Gallup arguing that leaders should encourage openness without losing sight of personal space — something that may sound straightforward on paper but can be considerably more difficult to navigate in practice.
Worth noting: not everyone wants a close friendship at work. Roughly one in ten people prefers keeping private and professional life separate. Interestingly, 45% of that group still says they'd like to have a best friend at work despite that preference, suggesting the desire for genuine connection runs deeper than people's stated boundaries sometimes admit.
Trust doesn't need to become a civil war
Trusting a colleague means knowing you can ask for help without having it held against you later, and disagree without every differing opinion escalating into open conflict. In short, it means feeling comfortable enough to explore possibilities and speak openly without bracing for fallout.
None of this means becoming best friends with everyone in the office, and no amount of corporate dinners or team-building exercises can turn a group of colleagues into one big happy “family” — nor should they. There is a meaningful distinction between a good working relationship and a personal friendship, and recognising that difference matters. What can develop, though, is a genuine sense of connection between colleagues, provided it is given room to grow rather than being imposed from the top down.
What can develop is a genuine sense of connection between colleagues, provided it is given room to grow rather than being imposed from the top down.
Where companies can actually help
What companies can do is create the conditions in which genuine interactions have room to develop naturally, and in this context, creating real opportunities for collaboration and shared experiences allows people to get to know one another beyond their job titles and reporting lines. This is precisely where team building can earn its keep: not as a magic fix, but as a structured opportunity for the kind of connection that rarely has the chance to develop organically during a packed workday.
Having spoken with hundreds of clients about how their teams perform after a team building event, the pattern holds consistently: the value isn't in the activity itself, whether that's a treasure hunt, a cooking class or a strategy game. It's in the space it creates for people to interact without the usual pressures of deadlines and deliverables sitting between them.
That space, used well, is precisely what turns colleagues into people who genuinely trust each other, which, according to Gallup's numbers, translates directly into better work, and considerably fewer Monday mornings spent dreading the office.